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The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau

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The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau

By: Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Narrated by: Jonathan Keeble
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About this listen

Published four years after Rousseau's death, Confessions is a remarkably frank and honest self-portrait, described by Rousseau as "the history of my soul". From his idyllic youth in the Swiss mountains, to his career as a composer in Paris and his abandonment of his children, Rousseau lays bare his entire life with preternatural honesty. He relates his scandals, follies, jealousies, sexual exploits, and unrequited loves, as well as the torrential events surrounding his controversial works Discourses, Emile, and The Social Contract, which led to his persecution and wanderings in exile. Confessions provides an invaluable window into the making of the man, the society he lived in, and the development of ideas that would have a profound influence on philosophers and political theorists to come.

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Public Domain (P)2020 Naxos AudioBooks Logic & Language Philosophy Political Science Politics & Government
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Seriously boring. It's also amazing. It's an unprecedented insight into the life of an upper class 1700's European man, meaning petty squabbles and disputes, misinterpretations and drama, completely subjective and unbelievably judgemental.

But, and it's a huge but; it's a fairly genuine insight into the mind of a Great Mind and the things this Mind needed to endure. Could you imagine getting mobbed by religious clans or townsfolks wherever you go? Do you carry a small sword strolling Paris? Do you feel like stealing a few apples from a tree is a crime? Would you walk this mans shoes? I bet not.

The mind of the upper class man in the 1700's is seriously hard to grasp, and yet somehow man hasn't changed a bit since then. We are the same humans as we were back then, but the language code and clothes may have changed a bit. It's enlightening, even if (or maybe especially) you're not into philosophy.

Voyeur

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